Latest News from OpenNebula Cloud on Ulitzer

C12G Introduces Free Evaluation and Low-Cost Entry Programs to Build Clouds with OpenNebula EE

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:58:13 EDT

Cloud Interoperability and Portability Down to Earth with OpenNebula

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:51:40 EDT

It is said that one image says more than a thousand words. This image illustrates how OpenNebula emphasizes interoperability and portability, recognizing that their users have data-centers composed of different hardware and software components for security, virtualization, storage, and networking.

OpenNebula Selected to Build the PaaS Cloud of the Future

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:40:24 EDT

The OpenNebula Project has just announced that OpenNebula has been selected as cloud management tool for the EU's 4CaaSt project. OpenNebula will provide this new strategic European project with a powerful technoloy to build IaaS clouds supporting automatic scaling of resources to run the business use-case scenarios in real world conditions, consolidating its position at the cutting edge of cloud computing technology worldwide. 4CaaSt is a15-million-Euro EU-funded initiative (EU grant agreement 258862) funded by the 7th FWP (Seventh Framework Programme) under the Internet of Services, Software & virtualisation (ICT-2009.1.2) area, aimed at creating an advanced PaaS Cloud platform which supports the optimized and elastic hosting of Internet-scale multi-tier applications. 4CaaSt embeds all the necessary features, easing programming of rich applications and enabling the creation of a true business ecosystem where applications coming from different providers can be tailored to different users, mashed up and traded together. The project brings together a consortium of Europe's leading experts in cloud computing, including UPM, 2nd Quadrant Limited, BonitaSoft, Bull SAS, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Ericsson GMBH, FlexiScale, France Telecom, Universitat St Gallen, ICCS/NTUA, Nokia Siemens Networks, SAP AG, Telecom Italia, UCM (DSA-Research), Universitaet Stuutgart, UvT-EISS, and ZIB.

Release of OpenNebula 2.0 Beta

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:43:04 EDT

The OpenNebula team has just announced the release the first beta version of what is to become OpenNebula 2.0 next September. OpenNebula 2.0 Beta 1 is targeted at testers and users that would like to peep at what’s coming to their clouds!. OpenNebula 2.0 beta includes a significant amount of changes and new features in many areas, bringing the most flexible, scalable and feature rich Cloud Toolkit to the Free Software community. OpenNebula 2.0 is the result of a close collaboration with our user community to address their scalability, flexibility and security requirements in large-scale production systems.

The OpenNebula Position on the OpenStack Announcement

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:15:00 EDT

As many of you know, a new open-source cloud platform, OpenStack, was recently announced. Here at OpenNebula, we think this is a very exciting development in the cloud community, and we're glad to see so many major players coalescing around an open-source solution. However, we have also been concerned by the all the high-profile announcements and opinion pieces that describe OpenStack as the first initiative for the definition of an open architecture for IaaS cloud computing and a "real" open-source project, criticizing some existing open-source cloud projects as being "open-core" closed initiatives (in some cases conflating "open-core" with "having an Enterprise edition"), and pointing out their lack of extensibility and inability to efficiently scale to manage tens of thousand of VMs. This is the reason why we have decided to write this post in order to clearly state our position in order to avoid misunderstandings, particularly with our growing community of users.

Enterprise Usage of OpenNebula at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:32:00 EDT

Future enterprise data centers will look like private clouds supporting a flexible and agile execution of virtualized services, and combining local with public cloud-based infrastructure to enable highly scalable hosting environments. The key component in these cloud architectures will be the cloud management system, also called the cloud operating system (OS), which is responsible for the secure, efficient and scalable management of cloud resources. Cloud OSes are displacing "traditional" OSes, which will be part of the application stack. In his session at the 7th International Cloud Expo, Ignacio M. Llorente, Professor of the DSA Research Group at UCM, will discuss the OpenNebula Ecosystem, which was recently established in order to promote the different tools, extensions and plug-ins that are available to complement OpenNebula from a wide variety of projects, companies and research centers.

NASA's Nebula Cloud Technology to Play Key Role in Open Source Initiative

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 06:00:00 EDT

The core technology developed for NASA's Nebula cloud computing platform has been selected as a contributor for OpenStack, a newly launched open source cloud computing initiative. It will pull together more than 25 companies to play a key role in driving cloud computing standards for interoperability and portability. Cloud computing is a way to deliver computing resources, such as software, storage and virtual computing power, as services over the Internet. NASA launched the Nebula cloud computing platform to provide agency researchers with a range of services powerful enough to manage NASA's large-scale scientific data sets. Nebula offers unparalleled compute capability, storage and bandwidth to users at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

OpenNebula Technology Days - Summer 2010

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:44:13 EDT

C12G Labs will host the first edition of the OpenNebula Technology Days on the 20th and 21th of July. This first community event includes a tutorial on building clouds with OpenNebula and a technical workshop to present the new features and integration capabilities in the upcoming version. Attendance to the event is by invitation only. A representation of advanced users of the technology, featured projects in the community and C12G partners has been invited, trying to limit the number of participants in order to ensure an effective event.

StratusLab - European Initiative to Integrate Cloud with Grid Technologies

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:45:35 EDT

Researchers from a collaboration of six European organisations have attracted funding worth €2.3million to develop a new Internet-based software project called StratusLab. The two year project, headed up by Project Coordinator Dr Charles Loomis from CNRS, was launched in Paris on the 14th of June 2010. It aims to enhance distributed computing infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), that allow research and higher education institutes from around the world to pool computing resources. Funded through the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the two year project aims to successfully integrate ‘cloud computing’ technologies into ‘grid’ infrastructures. Grids link computers and data that are scattered across the globe to work together for common goals, whilst cloud computing makes software platforms or virtual servers available as a service over the Internet, usually on a commercial basis, and provides a way for organisations to access computing capacity without investing directly in new infrastructure. Behind cloud services are data centres that typically house large numbers of processors and vast data storage systems. Linking grid and cloud technologies will result in major benefits for European academic research and is part of the European Commission strategy to develop European computing infrastructures.

Building Hybrid Clouds with OpenNebula and Deltacloud

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 07:00:00 EDT

OpenNebula has just released a Deltacloud adaptor to build Hybrid Clouds. A Hybrid Cloud is an extension of a Private Cloud to combine local resources with resources from one or several remote Cloud providers. The remote provider could be a commercial Cloud service or a partner private infrastructure running a different OpenNebula instance. Hybrid Cloud computing functionality enables the building of cloudbursting and cloud federation scenarios.

OpenNebula Announces vCloud API Implementation

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:52:49 EDT

Building Your Open Source Private Cloud in Five Steps

Thu, 27 May 2010 14:19:02 EDT

C12G has just contributed to the OpenNebula Ecosystem its OpenNebula Express installer under GPL open-source license.This installer eases the installation and deployment of OpenNebula clouds. In few minutes you will get a fully operational cloud from a cluster with a a clean install of the operating system. This is the fastest track to cloud computing, enabling any organization to have an enterprise-grade cloud in four steps. OpenNebula is the most advanced solution for Cloud Computing. It can be adapted into any existing datacenter to build a private, public or hybrid cloud. Due to this flexibility, OpenNebula can be configured in many different ways, and at times, for new users, it might be challenging to read through the documentation to decide about the structure of their deployment. The aim of this innovative component is to provide a simple installer to deploy OpenNebula quickly and effortlessly.

Deltacloud and Libcloud Drivers for OpenNebula

Wed, 19 May 2010 18:01:02 EDT

C12G Announces OpenNebula Enterprise Edition v1.4

Sat, 15 May 2010 12:00:00 EDT

C12G Announces OpenNebula Enterprise Edition v1.4 Release of the First Enterprise Edition of OpenNebula

OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit Goes Commercial

Wed, 05 May 2010 21:00:00 EDT

The authors of the widely used OpenNebula toolkit have founded a company to provide value-added enterprise-solutions around this leading open source technology for cloud computing. C12G Labs has been created to address the growing demand for commercial support and services around OpenNebula. "Our experience is that one single cloud solution does not fit all the requirements and constraints from any data center. We provide our partners with technology and services to build their custom cloud solution, product or service", said Ignacio M. Llorente, co-lead of the OpenNebula open-source project and Chief Executive Advisor of C12G Labs. "We are very excited with this new venture that will contribute to the future sustainability of OpenNebula. This open-source cloud-enabling technology will continue being distributed under Apache license and matured through a vibrant community. C12G has a strong commitment with OpenNebula and will contribute back to the community repository".

OpSource Announces CEO Presentation at Cloud Expo

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:45:00 EDT

Long a leader in the Software-as-a-Service space, OpSource has helped pioneer enterprise cloud computing with OpSource Cloud. OpSource Cloud™ is the first cloud computing solution to bring together the flexibility, availability and community of the public cloud with the security, performance and control the enterprise demands. Emphasizing security, OpSource Cloud provides enterprise users with a virtual private cloud within the public cloud, allowing them to determine their own degree of Internet connectivity. OpSource Cloud also offers the best SLA available from any Cloud vendor, reflecting the company's commitment to deliver enterprise-class reliability, performance and support.

Release of Claudia, an Open Source Service Manager Platform

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:15:00 EDT

As part of its exploitation strategy, Telefónica I+D has decided to release as Open Source a number of components developed during its research on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. These components will be integrated in the Claudia Platform that will offer a Service Management toolkit to deploy and control the scalability of service among a public or private IaaS Cloud. Telefónica I+D chooses MORFEO Project to release the software because it guarantees the access to the results of research beyond the end of the project.

OpenNebula Takes Star Turn in Cloud Computing Innovation

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:00:00 EDT

In this session Professor Llorente will describe the innovations in cloud management brought by the OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit. This widely used open-source Cloud manager fits into existing data centers to build private, public and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Clouds. Most of its innovative features have been developed to address requirements from business use cases in RESERVOIR, flagship of European research initiatives in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. The innovations comprise support for elastic multi-tier services; flexible and scalable back-end for virtualization, storage and networking management; and support for Cloud federation and interoperability. The session will end with an introduction to the community and ecosystem evolving around OpenNebula and its contributions to ongoing standardization efforts in Cloud Computing.

Cloud Expo to Offer Special Free Pass to Everyone Who Retweets @CloudExpo

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:00:00 EDT

Cloud Expo, Inc. announced on Thursday that it will offer a special free "TwitterVIPpass" to everyone who retweets the upcoming event @CloudExpo. The largest Cloud event in the world will take place April 19 -21 at the Javits Center in New York City. Free "Twitter Retweet" event passes will be issued to everyone who retweets the event @CloudExpo. The pass will offer free access to three full-day special events that are co-located with Cloud Expo New York. "TwitterVIPpass"registration offers access to the following full-day session each day.

BrightTALK Hosts Next Generation Data Center Summit

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:26:48 EDT

Supporting the OpenNebula Cloud Ecosystem

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:45:00 EST

The OpenNebula open source project has just released a new web site. This is not only a new look for opennebula.org but a whole new site for the community, a new place to share resources, contribute developments and discuss about components and solutions around OpenNebula. In the last years, many projects, research groups and companies have built new virtualization and cloud components to complement and to enhance the functionality provided by OpenNebula. In response to this growth, the OpenNebula Ecosystem has been established to.

A Flexible and Interoperable Cloud Operating System

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:30:00 EST

OpenNebula Cloud Computing Architecture at Cloud Expo

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:45:00 EST

The OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit is a widely used open source Cloud manager for building private, public and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. In his session at the 5th International Cloud Expo, Ignacio M. Llorente, a Full Professor in Computer Architecture and Technology and the Head of the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group at Complutense University of Madrid, will describe the innovations in cloud management brought by the OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit. a widely used open-source Cloud manager for building private, public and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

OpenNebula Cloud Computing Topic Launched on Ulitzer

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:30:00 EST

OpenNebula, which was was born as a research project in 2005 by Dr. Rubén S. Montero, Dr. Ignacio M. Llorente, is an open and flexible tool that fits into existing data center environments to build any type of Cloud deployment. OpenNebula can be primarily used as a virtualization tool to manage your virtual infrastructure in the data-center or cluster, which is usually referred as Private Cloud. OpenNebula supports Hybrid Cloud to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, enabling highly scalable hosting environments. OpenNebula also supports Public Clouds by providing Cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management.

Building Private and Hybrid Clouds with Ubuntu 9.04

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:15:00 EST

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) has been released today bringing highly interesting new features, specially in the Cloud Computing and Virtualization area. The new Ubuntu server distribution includes two complementary cloud tools, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus, so providing the technology required to build the three types of Cloud architectures, namely private, hybrid and public clouds.

OpenNebula Cloud Computing Toolkit v1.4 Released

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:15:00 EST

The OpenNebula team has just announced the stable state for the new 1.4 series of the OpenNebula Toolkit. During these months the team has been working on new features that will be quite helpful to manage a Cloud infrastructure. Downloads are available as source code under Apache license as previous versions but they have also created binary packages for RedHat/CentOS, Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora.

Predicting the Great Cloud Shakeout – Don’t Become CloudKill

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:30:00 EST

Setting aside the shameless cloud-washing that’s going on from some vendors, there are a lot of cloud service providers (CSPs – providers of cloud) today. Many of those listed in Sys-Con’s Top 150 report are CSPs, while others are providing extensions, tools or services for clouds. Everybody’s a cloud provider these days – and as [...]

The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:45:00 EDT

A robust ecosystem of solutions providers is emerging around cloud computing.Here, SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal expands its popular list of most active players in the fast-emerging Cloud Ecosystem, from the 'mere' 100 we identified back in January of this year, to half as many again - testimony, if any further were needed, to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing.

Private (Internal) Clouds

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:42:00 EDT

I’ve been doing a lot of work on private (internal) clouds lately – it’s a result of my new job with Unisys. Part of that work has been spending time with customers on their plans for cloud computing — internal and external. There’s some very interesting work going on in the private cloud space, and the solutions available to enterprises to build their clouds are many.

OpenNebula Implements the OGF Open Cloud Computing Interface Draft Spec

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Last Friday, the OpenNebula project announced the implementation of the OGF OCCI draft specification. The release, that will be part of OpenNebula 1.4, includes a server implementation, clients command for using the service and enabling access to the full functionality of the OCCI interface, and several supporting documents. The last version of this open source toolkit for cloud computing, available for download in beta release, also brings libvirt, EC2 Query API, and a powerful CLI, and all of them can be used on the same OpenNebula instance, so users can use their favorite interface. In fact, OpenNebula brings support to develop other Cloud interfaces. Moreover all those interfaces can be used on any of the virtualization technologies supported, Xen, KVM and VMware.

One Cloud Standard to Rule Them All

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:15:00 EDT

Lots of discussion recently on the the topic of Cloud standards and a potential Cloud standards war emerging. Thought I'd give you a quick run down.

In an article written by Tom Nolle for Internet Evolution he asks if Multiple Standards Could Spoil Cloud Computing. In the post he says " too many standards are worse than no standards at all, because these efforts can stifle innovation and even implementation. In the case of cloud computing, there’s also the big question of whether standards being pushed for private clouds will end up contaminating the successful Internet model of cloud computing."

Tom also gives some love to my Unified Cloud Interface concept saying "The best hope for a unification is the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum. Its Unified Cloud Architecture tackles standards by making public cloud computing interoperable. Their map of cloud computing shows the leading public cloud providers and a proposed Unified Cloud Interface that the body defines, with a joking reference to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, as “One API to Rule them All". So then, why not have that “One API” rule private clouds, too? A single top-down vision of cloud computing for public and private clouds has to be a better approach." -- amen brotha.

(As a side note, I'm still committed to the concept of Semantic Cloud Abstraction and the Unified Cloud Interface Project (UCI), but lack the time to do much with it given all my various commitments. So if you're interested in helping do something more around the concept of semantic cloud API's, please feel free to get in touch. Currently I would describe the UCI as a science experiment at best.)

Elsewhere on the standards front, on Friday the OpenNebula project announced that they had made available a prototype implementation of the OCCI draft specification. In case you're not familar with OCCI, it's a simple open APIspecification for remote management of cloud computing infrastructures focused on multicloud interoperability. In the note to the OCCI mailing list they stated that they believe that it is important to have an implementation in order to demo the standard, which they think will provide value by being able to show people how the standard will function in a real world environment. The prototype includes a server implementation, client command for using the service and enabling access to the full functionality of the OCCI interface.

Some other interesting recent cloud standards commentary includes a post by Simon Wardley with an assertion that a standards war is now in full swing. In the post Wardley outlines several considerations for cloud standards including;

A specification can be controlled, influenced and directed more easily than an open source project.
A specification can easily be exceeded providing mechanisms of lock-in whilst still retaining compliance to a 'standard'.
A specification needs to be implemented and depending upon the size and complexity of the 'standard' this can create significant adoption barriers to having multiple implementations.
Open source reference models provide a rapid means of implementing a 'standard' and hence encourage adoption.
Open source reference models provide a mechanism for testing the compliance of any proprietary re-implementation.
Adoption and becoming de facto are key to winning this war.

Christofer Hoff also chimes in saying "A Cloud standards war? War is such an ugly term. It’s just the normal activity associated with disruptive innovation and the markets sorting themselves out. The standards arena is simply where the dirty laundry gets exposed. Get used to it, there’s enough mud/FUD flinging that you can expect several loads"

Personally I would say that at the end of the day, cloud standards seem to have little to do with customer requirements but instead more to do with marketeering and positioning for market dominance. If there truly is a cloud standards war emerging then the way it will be won will be based solely on the standard / platform with the broadest adoption. The technology (API, Platform, etc) with the broadest market penetration will ultimately win -- this is a certainty. Although personally I would prefer to see the "most open" and interoperable approach win, lets be realistic, the winner will most likely be the one with the largest share of cloud computing related revenue.

Xen Project Launches New Open Cloud Initiative

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 03:02:19 EDT

Xen.org, the home of the open source Xen hypervisor, today formally announced the Xen® Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative – a powerful new community-led effort to build on the growing leadership of the Xen hypervisor in today’s cloud, and deliver a secure and proven open source infrastructure platform for the federated cloud services of tomorrow. The Xen Cloud Platform will accelerate the use of cloud infrastructure for enterprise customers by providing open source virtual infrastructure technology that makes it easy for service providers to deliver secure, customizable, multi-tenant cloud services that work seamlessly with the virtualized application workloads customers are already running in their internal datacenters and private clouds, without locking them into any particular vendor.

Innovations in OpenNebula 1.4

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:15:00 EDT

This is the first post I am writing to illustrate the main novelties of the new version of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Manager. OpenNebula is an open-source toolkit for building Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud infrastructures based on Xen, KVM and VMware virtualization platforms.OpenNebula v1.4 is available in beta release, incorporating bleeding edge technologies and innovations in many areas of virtual infrastructure management and Cloud Computing.

Cloud Management Gets Easier with OpenNebula 1.4 Beta 1 - Ready for Testing

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:46:00 EDT

The OpenNebula team has announced the availability of OpenNebula 1.4 Beta1 Hourglass (1.3.80), this is the first preview of the next stable release... Read more at VMblog.com.

The Open-Source Toolkit for Building any Type of Cloud Deployment

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:00:00 EDT

The OpenNebula team has just announced the availability of OpenNebula 1.4 Beta Hourglass (1.3.80).This is the first preview of next stable release of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Manager. The new OpenNebula version incorporates bleeding edge technologies and innovations in many areas of virtual infrastructure management and Cloud Computing. OpenNebula 1.4 aims to be the swiss-army knife of Cloud Computing, being an open and flexible tool that fits into existing data center environments to build any type of Cloud deployment. OpenNebula can be primarily used as a virtualization tool to manage your virtual infrastructure in the data-center or cluster, which is usually referred as Private Cloud. OpenNebula supports Hybrid Cloud to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, enabling highly scalable hosting environments. OpenNebula also supports Public Clouds by providing Cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management.

Europe’s Largest Grid Project Moves Closer to Cloud-style Computing

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:00:00 EDT

The integration of two clans of computation, ‘grid’ and ‘cloud’ computing, is moving closer through collaboration between the projects Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) and Resources and Services Virtualisation without Barriers (RESERVOIR).

Energy Efficiency in Virtualized Distributed Environments

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:30:00 EDT

The agenda included a presentation about "VM Management for Green Data Centers with the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine". The talk presented and demonstrated a first prototype of the functionality provided by the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine to reduce energy demands through consolidation and dynamic management of virtual machines across a distributed infrastructure. OpenNebula provides a framework for the implementation of a reference model for the management of energy efficiency in virtualized distributed environments; monitoring energy attributes in the physical resources, orchestrating virtual machines, and controlling physical resources to meet energy requirements and policies.

Interfacing Private Clouds with the libvirt Virtualization API

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:15:00 EDT

In my post "Interfaces for Private and Public Cloud Computing", I briefly described the main differences between public and private cloud computing from the perspective of their different application scope and interfaces. My position was that a private cloud interface should provide rich enough semantics, far beyond of that provided by public clouds (such as Amazon EC2 APIs), to ease the integration of the distributed virtual infrastructure in the data-center management stack, including user and administration support. Such interface should provide additional functionality for virtualization, networking, image and physical resource configuration, management, monitoring and accounting, not exposed by pubic cloud interfaces.

Interfaces for Private and Public Cloud Computing

Mon, 04 May 2009 21:45:00 EDT

An entire ecosystem is evolving around cloud computing. Interface standardization efforts, commercial products, cloud infrastructure and management services, virtual appliance providers and open-source solutions are filling niches in the cloud ecosystem. The role and position of a component or a service in the ecosystem are defined by its capabilities, the consumers of those capabilities and its relationship with other components and services.

Advance Reservation of Capacity in Virtualized and Cloud Infrastructures

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:15:00 EST

Haizea is an open source lease management architecture that OpenNebula can use as a scheduling backend. Haizea can also be run in simulation, providing a platform for experimenting with scheduling algorithms that depend on VM (Virtual Machine) deployment or on the leasing abstraction. Haizea uses leases as a fundamental resource provisioning abstraction, and implements those leases as virtual machines, taking into account the overhead of using virtual machines (e.g., deploying a disk image for a VM) when scheduling leases. Using OpenNebula with Haizea allows resource providers to lease their resources, using potentially complex lease terms, instead of only allowing users to request VMs that must start immediately.

Interoperation Between Cloud Infrastructures

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:15:00 EST

A Distributed Virtual Infrastructure (VI) Manager is responsible for the efficient management of the virtual infrastructure as a whole, by providing functionality for deployment, control and monitoring of groups of interconnected Virtual Machines (VMs) across a pool of resources. An added functionality of these management tools is the dynamic scaling of the virtual infrastructure with resources from remote providers, so seamless integrating remote Cloud resources with in-house infrastructures. This novel functionality allows to add and remove capacity in order to meet peak or fluctuating service demands, so providing the foundation for interoperation between Cloud infrastructures. The distributed virtual infrastructure would run on top of a geographically distributed physical infrastructure consisting of resources from the private cloud and several external cloud providers.

Building Your Open Source Private Cloud

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:00:00 EST

Ruben S. Montero has published a series of posts in the DSA-research blog on the benefits of virtualizing a distributed infrastructure with the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine: In "The Private Clouds", Ruben discusses the motivations for building a private cloud using open-source technology. In "When 8 are 26 (or even more)", he shows a real case of server consolidation using OpenNebula to orchestrate a distributed infrastructure running Xen and KVM nodes.

Cloud Computing in Ubuntu

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:50:00 EST

The Ubuntu team announced one month ago their plan to offer a set of new software packages related to cloud computing in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), due to be released in April 2009. One of the target packages, the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine, is available for download from the Ubuntu repository. Ruben S. Montero has published a very nice "mini how-to" describing how to set up your own private cloud in only five steps with Ubuntu and OpenNebula.

OpenNebula 1.2 for Data Center Virtualization & Private Cloud Computing

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:18:00 EST

We have just announced the availability of OpenNebula 1.2 , the second stable release of the project. This is an important milestone for the project... Read more at VMblog.com.

OpenNebula 1.2 for Data Center Virtualization & Private Cloud Computing

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 09:45:00 EST

The OpenNebula virtual infrastructure engine provides efficient, dynamic and scalable management of groups of interconnected VMs within datacenters involving a large amount of virtual and physical servers. OpenNebula supports Xen and KVM platforms and can interface with remote cloud sites, being the only tool able to access on-demand to Amazon EC2 to dynamically scale the local infrastructure based on actual usage.

OpenNebula on the List of Top 100 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:52:03 EST

SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal has just expanded its list of most active players in the fast-emerging Cloud Ecosystem. The list includes the most active cloud players, which are driving the most Enterprise-relevant innovation. Cloud computing is an opportunity for organizations to implement low cost, low power and high efficiency systems ...

When 8 are 26 (or even more…)

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:52:03 EST

Nowadays it is difficult to find a place where virtualization benefits are not praised. One of my favorite ones is consolidation, that has finish with the "one application one server" paradigm. However, when you start placing your services on different hosts, you will find quickly that the new model does ...

The Foundation of Cloud Computing Infrastructures: Virtualization

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:05:00 EST

One of the relevant contributions of cloud computing is the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model. There are a number of research challenges in cloud infrastructures that, in my opinion, will need to be addressed in 2009. The open research issues are mainly related to new virtualization technologies to enable efficient, dynamic and scalable Cloud operation and interoperation.

The Role of Cloud Computing

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:00:00 EDT

Let me show how I see Cloud (and virtualization as enabling technology) and Grid as complementary technologies that will coexist and cooperate at different levels of abstraction in future infrastructures. I will first clearly state my position about Cloud and Grid, which are complementary technologies.

Open Cloud Computing: OpenNebula Engine for Data Center Virtualization Released

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:00:00 EDT

Virtualization has opened up avenues for new resource management techniques within the data center. Probably, the most important characteristic is its ability to dynamically shape a given hardware infrastructure to support different services with varying workloads. Therefore, effectively decoupling the management of the service (for example a web server or a computing cluster) from the management of the infrastructure (e.g. the resources allocated to each service or the interconnection network).